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To: Physicist
Ok, you have a point, but I think it is mainly applicable to micro-organisms, and even then there are limits to how far life can adapt.

See it this way, for other Earths we have only one test case, but for your idea we have nine test cases plus about 50 moons of pretty good size. No advanced life has developed on any of them, and probably no mirco-organisms either- despite the fact some have probably been "seeded" by earth biotics (from ateriod impacts blowing chucns of earth into space).

A lot had to go right for Earth to stay between the freezing and boiling temperature of water for 4 billion years. Take a look as this link

http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/design_evidences/20020502_solar_system_design.html?main

It gives 118 things that have to go right. Some of them are finicky. Multiply them all together and it looks like we should not even be here.

I mean, what you say is true as far as it goes, especially for micro-organisms that can evolve a lot faster and farther than metazoans. But it applies only when you have a habitable environment to begin with, otherwise all planets in the solar system would likely contain life that evolved from the first life on earth.

137 posted on 07/16/2002 12:49:34 PM PDT by Ahban
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To: Ahban
Ok, you have a point, but I think it is mainly applicable to micro-organisms, and even then there are limits to how far life can adapt.

You're still using far too narrow a definition of "life". Even in our universe (as opposed the universe as it might have been, whether or not there are other universes) there are many opportunities for complexity to arise beyond mere chemistry. Chemistry seems obviously necessary to us, because we happen to have arisen in a chemical milieu, but to a being who is composed of Alfven waves in the interior of a star, or who depends on the "neutron drip" nuclear chemistry on the surface of a neutron star, or who consists of bound plasmas in the horribly complicated magnetic fields of a supernova remnant, or who is composed of superfluid eddies in a pool of liquid helium on an intergalactic planetoid, the Earth seems as inhospitable a place as could be imagined, and organic chemistry wildly inappropriate as a basis for life.

See it this way, for other Earths we have only one test case, but for your idea we have nine test cases plus about 50 moons of pretty good size. No advanced life has developed on any of them, and probably no mirco-organisms either- despite the fact some have probably been "seeded" by earth biotics (from ateriod impacts blowing chucns of earth into space).

If we find any sort of life anywhere in the solar system except Earth, then life is outrageously common, bank on it. I don't expect we will, but that doesn't won't that life isn't common across the galaxy.

156 posted on 07/16/2002 2:23:59 PM PDT by Physicist
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